The New Yorker:

Republicans have offered a different approach—speaking to Latinos the same way they do to everyone else.

By Geraldo Cadava

Among the many signs that Joe Biden would lose to Donald Trump in November was his flagging support among Latinos. In past elections, Democrats had been accustomed to winning an average of about two-thirds of the Latino vote, but in 2020 Biden fell short of that, winning fifty-nine per cent. This year, polls showed that, at best, Biden was beating Trump among Latinos by a slightly narrower margin than last time and, at worst, that the two candidates were tied or even that Biden was running behind Trump. Kamala Harris now looks like she has a chance to change that trajectory. The day after Biden dropped out, Carlos Odio, a researcher of Latino public opinion, cited polls in Nevada, a critical swing state, showing that Harris “wins back some Latinos who had slipped away from Biden.” Matt Barreto, who was Biden’s and is now Harris’s Latino pollster, pointed to Harris’s greater favorability among young Latinos, undecided Latinos, and other key segments of the Latino voting population.

Harris, however, not only represents the Biden Administration; she has inherited Biden’s campaign infrastructure—which raises the question of whether she will keep a Latino campaign strategy that was looking increasingly like a failure, spending millions without gaining ground among voters. Before Biden stepped down from the ticket, his campaign had done almost everything that liberal Latino advocates said they wanted to see: it committed significant resources to grassroots outreach and Spanish-language advertising, opened multiple field offices in Latino communities, and promised that it wouldn’t let up before the election. Biden’s and Harris’s campaign manager is Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a granddaughter of Cesar Chávez, who served in the Obama and Biden Administrations and worked for Harris in her Senate office. Biden was a guest on popular Spanish-language radio shows, and Harris appeared on Univision and Telemundo.

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